I've been hard at work puzzling over the name-to-be of TOP's photo book publishing company, so names and naming have been much on my mind. A good name needs to be distinctive, easy to remember (at least after you've "got it"—that is, after it's set in your mind), and—crucially these days—readil...

I recently converted my mid-2010 15" MacBook Pro (2.66 GHz Core i7, 8 GB RAM) to have a DIY Fusion Drive. I replaced the optical drive with a WD Scorpio Black 750 GB drive mounted in an OWC Data Doubler frame, and replaced the 7200 RPM 512 GB Seagate Momentus drive with a 240 GB OCZ Vertex Plus R2 (the machine only has a SATA II interface, so no need to buy a faster drive); this gives a 1 TB fusion drive, 25% of which is SSD. I did the magic invocations detailed on:
http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com/post/34638496292/fusion-drive-on-older-macs-yes-since-apple-has
with the exception that I formatted both drives as jhfs+ and then used /dev/disk0s2 and /dev/disk1s2 rather than disk0 and disk1 in creating the fusion drive. The result simply screams! If you want, I can write an article describing how to do this.

By Ctein Periodically I write columns to bring you up-to-date on topics that I've addressed in previous ones. This is one of those. Printing papers, revisited Years back I wrote about the quality control problems with inkjet papers, especially the Harman by Hahnemuhle Gloss Baryta. It had such...

Mike,
Maybe you should move your interest sideways? For example, De Vere (who used to make beautifully over-engineered professional enlargers, including some for sheet film) have produced this hybrid which lets you print digital images on to silver bromide paper:
http://www.de-vere.com/products.htm
Sorry to add another option to distract you. :-)
Alun

Illustration courtesy camerasize.com About that crack I made about selling all my cameras: I'd better 'splain. It's very tempting to keep this quiet, but, to paraphrase David Vestal, I'm "in the disclosure business," so I might as well take a deep breath and blurt it out. The truth is: my old...

Non-photographic:
Neil Shubin: 'Your Inner Fish'. A rather nice book about animal anatomy and how it was shaped by evolution. A little *too* chatty in parts, though I bet his lectures in Chicago are great fun. The structure of the limbs is described as: 'One bone, two bones, lotsa blobs, digits.'
Chad Orzel: 'How to Teach Physics to Your Dog'. Really fun book on quantum mechanics, with the author discussing the concepts with his dog (who *really* likes the idea of Schrödinger's Cat). You can find videos of the author reading from it on the web.
Jared Diamond 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'. An anthropological/sociological classic.
Lewis Wolpert: 'How We Live and Why We Die: the secret lives of cells'. Wolpert is an FRS, editor of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, and rather bizarrely a civil engineer who became a cell biologist. This is a very gentle introduction to what goes on in our bodies.
Photographic:
Bill Jay and Nigel Warburton: 'Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt'. Unlike Brandt's 'Shadow of Light' (which with it shares a lot of content), this contains a some background information as well. Beautifully printed by Thames & Hudson. The rear of the dustcover has a quotation from Ansel Adams:
'There are very few artists -- in the true sense of the term -- who practice photography. A photograph by Bill Brandt proclaims him an artist and a poet of the highest order.'

Anybody read any great books lately? I'm looking for what to read next.... Mike And a P.S.: Historically I get my best book recommendations from my brother Scott, and he and I have a friendly guideline we call the Pinker Rule. The name comes from a Stephen Pinker book that starts out very promis...

Some of the most interesting dual-lens systems were the V-series digital P&S cameras from Kodak. I have the V705, which has two Schneider-Kreuznach lenses, a 23 mm-e prime and a 39-117 mm-e zoom, each with their own 7 MP sensor. The Kodak datasheet is here:
Kodak V705 datasheet (PDF).

Mostly but not entirely garnered from the comments: • Two lenses extremely far apart in focal length, like a 21mm and a 180mm, or even a 21–35mm and a 400mm. (Not sure what formats were implied in those cases.) • Two lenses, but on two separate cameras from two different systems. (One reader sug...

Many years ago when I was still shooting with my Russian Zenit-E 35 mm SLR, I'd read a bit about optics. The standard lens on the Zenit was a copy of a 58 mm f/2 Zeiss Biotar (a Helios 44-2): a 6-element 4-group double-Gauss design. I knew that by removing the rear block of three elements (easily done: the whole block just unscrewed) I would obtain a 116 mm f/4 lens, almost completely uncorrected for spherical aberration. I used extension tubes so that I could obtain focus (the tubes were dirt cheap because this was a 42 mm thread lens with no mechanical couplings -- a preset manual diaphragm). Result: a very nice soft-focus lens, ideal for portrait work (although my favourite picture was of a sheep). Perhaps we will now have a run on Zenits on eBay, just to obtain the lens (which was actually a pretty fair performer normally; it was also child's play to screw the rear three elements back in to restore normal function). Sorry I can't show you any examples: I don't have a scanner that will take 12" x 16" prints.

Yesterday's post about lenses that aren't terribly sharp might have made you think of premium soft-focus portrait lenses like the Cooke PS945 or the Rodenstock Imagon. Or, if you're not a large-format kinda person, maybe the Lensbaby or the Holga. As you probably know, there's a whole toy-camer...